>I have Karajan's 1962 recording of the Sixth as part of a (LP) set of the
>complete symphonies (with the BPO, naturally).  Not only can't I fault it,


>but I think it's one of the very best performances ever recorded by anyone
>(and I remember H.H. Stuckenschmidt, the leading German music critic of
>the time, praising it highly--in the Neue Zeitung, I believe).

However, the same HHS also called Karajan's 1982 Berlin Mahler 9 the
greatest live performance he'd ever heard of anything.

>The set also includes a Ninth not only featuring, but blessed by, the
>performances of Gundula Janowitz, Hilde Roessl-Majdan, Waldemar Kmentt,
>and Walter Berry.  What a recording!

Well the others don't turn my crank, but the divine Gundula is reason
enough to buy this 9th.

Deryk Barker posted contesting Denis Fodor's favorable opinon of
Karajan's 1962 LP recording of the Pastorale.  He insisted it is:

>Too fast, febrile and *OMITS THE REPEAT IN THE SCHERZO DAMMIT!*

Moreover, he was unimpressed by H.H. Stuckenschmidt's recommendation of
the recording--hinting that this was his attitude toward Stuckenschmidt,
tout court.  Now, it is likely that DG's Elsa Scheller, who oversaw the
production of the set (aided by Otto Gerdes and Guenter Hermanns) ran into
a variety of problems that may have entailed fitting time to space.  The
nine symphonies are packed into eight 33-r.p.m.records.  Karajan did,
of course, cut one repat, and he may have done so, it occurs to me, to
accomodate Prof. Schiller.  But such were the exigencies of making
recordings back in those day (not that they've entirely dissolved since
then).  Listening to the 6th in this set I have always realized that
animating the music there were the motifs of a storm and a thunderstorm.
Never, however, did I feel that the rendering of these natural upsets
were sufficiently feverish to oblige me to pop an aspirin.  As for
Stuckenschmidt, fact is that he was Berlin's leading music critic in a time
when the city's music life was illuminated by such stars as Furtwaengler,
Celibidache, Karajan and Felsenstein.  Stuckenschmnidt understood their
music both from his scholarly background and from his mingling with these
men and the musicians around them.  I bought the set on his recommendation
(I worked alongside him on a Berlin newspaper, though not in his own
feuilleton department).  Deryk Barker who has an astonishing grasp of
discography, along with a sureness of taste curried by long experience, is
an excellent source of advice on matter that is in the purview of his own
time.  Simlarly Stuckeschmidt, for a purview that takes us a generation
back.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]